


And I Will Learn Throughout My Life to Never Lean on What Will Bend

by adventurepants



Category: Glee
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-01-19
Updated: 2010-01-19
Packaged: 2017-10-15 22:43:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,710
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/165607
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/adventurepants/pseuds/adventurepants
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“If I agree to let you come shopping with me, will you stop talking?”  Season one; Quinn needs maternity clothes.</p>
            </blockquote>





	And I Will Learn Throughout My Life to Never Lean on What Will Bend

After the rush of winning Sectionals wore off, it wasn’t that life went quite back to normal, just that it slowed down. The regional competition was coming up, but it was far off enough that it didn’t seem real yet, and the sense of urgency at Glee practice had temporarily ebbed.

Finn was too good a person to throw his pregnant ex-girlfriend out on the street with nowhere to go, but Quinn knew she had to leave, anyway. It took a bit of gentle suggestion, and an elbow in the ribs from Santana, but Brittany quickly offered up her own home for Quinn to stay in, “as long as you don’t lose all the house keys, my mom gets really mad when that happens.”

Brittany set up the guest room for Quinn- “But you could totally stay in my room with me, if you wanted.” Brittany had twin beds in her room, and when they were little, she and Quinn and Santana would push them together for sleepovers so they could all be in the same bed, whispering and giggling into the early hours of the morning. They still pushed the beds together when Santana came over, but on those nights Quinn was banished to the guest room.

“Sorry, Q,” Santana would say, clearly not sorry at all, as she shoved one bed toward its mate. “We need a little privacy.”

Quinn wasn’t sure where she stood, exactly, now that her two best friends were dating each other. And not just sex, real dating. It had taken less than a day for Brittany’s admission of their sexual exploits to reach the entire population of McKinley High, at which point Santana had declared, “Fuck it. Brittany, we’re dating.”

It wasn’t that Quinn was surprised, exactly- Brittany had always been the only person who could make Santana smile. And it wasn’t as if Quinn, a pregnant teenager, could judge them for committing homosexual acts- and anyway, by now she was pretty sure that most of what her parents and her church had shoved down her throat for the past sixteen years was bullshit. But it was different now, with the three of them. Quinn felt awkward, like a constant third wheel.

This, combined with the fact that Finn wasn’t speaking to her, and she wasn’t speaking to Puck, left her feeling painfully lonely. And fat.

Rachel found her in the girls’ bathroom during lunch one day, staring at her now quite large baby bump in the mirror with a vaguely disgusted look on her face.

“You need maternity clothes,” Rachel said assertively, joining Quinn in front of the sinks.

“No, I don’t,” Quinn answered, eyes still fixed on her drastically changed figure. Nothing on her looked like it belonged to a Cheerio, anymore.

“Yes, you do,” Rachel continued, firm but not unkind, looking at Quinn in the mirror as well. “Even your more loosely-fitting garments are reaching their limits. You need to go shopping.”

“Why do you even care, Man Hands?” Quinn snapped, training her intimidating gaze on the shorter girl. “Shouldn’t you be rounding second base with Finn right now?”

Rachel didn’t flinch at this attack, and instead met Quinn’s eyes with the same unrelenting focus she gave to everything in her life. “First of all, I don’t know why you insist upon using an inaccurate insult. My hands are very feminine. And secondly, I decided I would rather be your friend than Finn’s girlfriend. Sure, I find him attractive, and he’s a talented performer and athlete, but he’s not very bright,” she said, brisk and unapologetic. “I always envisioned my partner as more of my intellectual match.”

Quinn crossed her arms over her chest. “So that means you’re bothering me, because…” She raised an eyebrow, waiting for an answer.

“You need friends,” Rachel said. “I know what that’s like. And believe it or not, I like the person you’re becoming. I’ve seen a different side of you since you joined Glee, and you’ve displayed remarkable strength in the face of all the obstacles you’ve come up against in the past few months. I think—”

“Berry!” Quinn interrupted her. “The length of this conversation is way out of proportion to my interest in it. If I agree to let you come shopping with me, will you stop talking?”

Rachel smiled, satisfied. “Yes.”

Quinn turned back to the mirror. “Good. You can meet me at my car after school. And don’t think I’ll be taking any fashion advice from you. Anything you pick out, I go for the exact opposite. Got it?”

Rachel nodded, smile reaching her eyes. “Got it.”

*

“Come out here and let me see.” Rachel stood outside Quinn’s dressing room, tapping her foot impatiently.

“No,” was Quinn’s stern answer.

“Quinn, come on. I’m going to see you in these clothes anyway.”

She heard Quinn slide the lock of the dressing room door. “You can come in here, but I’m not going out there to parade myself around.”

Rachel pushed the door open and joined Quinn in the small room. “You look nice!”

Quinn rolled her eyes, flipping her hair over her shoulder. “I don’t look nice. Pregnant girls don’t look nice, they look misshapen.”

“Quinn, I know being a Cheerio has given you an incredibly narrow and misguided idea of what’s attractive, but pregnancy is a natural and beautiful state for the female body. You don’t look misshapen. You’re carrying the extra weight wonderfully, in fact.”

“Whatever. When did you start perving on baby bumps?”

Rachel ignored Quinn, and instead addressed her belly. “She looks much better in properly fitting clothes, doesn’t she, little one?”

Quinn bristled and stepped away from Rachel, the back of her legs bumping into the bench next to the mirror. “Don’t do that.”

Rachel stood up, looking startled. “Don’t do what?”

“Talk to it.”

“But it’s good for babies to be talked to while they’re in the womb,” Rachel began, confused.

“I said don’t do it,” Quinn snapped, all the venom that had been missing from her voice in recent weeks returning instantly. She paused, then added, “I’d like to change, if you could give me some privacy, please.”

Rachel nodded, looking a little bit like she’d just been slushied, and went back to her spot outside the dressing room. When Quinn didn’t emerge after a few minutes, Rachel gently knocked on the door. “Quinn? Are you all right?”

“I’m fine.”

“Are you going to come out of there?”

“Not right this second.”

Rachel wasn’t sure how to respond, but she decided on an apology. “I’m sorry if I offended you.”

Quinn didn’t answer right away. Rachel thought she was ignoring her, until she heard Quinn say, very quietly, “You can come back in if you want.”

Quinn was sitting on the floor of the dressing room in her own clothes, her back against the mirror. Rachel stood over her awkwardly, until Quinn told her she could sit down, too.

“Do you ever think about your mom?” Quinn asked, hands resting on her stomach.

Rachel shook her head. “I don’t have a mom, I had a surrogate.”

“Well, do you think of her?” Quinn asked again, becoming impatient.

“No,” Rachel answered simply. “I was never hers. I belonged to my fathers right from the beginning. So there’s not much to think about. She’s just a nice stranger who gave me a place to stay until my dads could take me home.”

Quinn ran her hands over her stomach, thinking, and the baby kicked in response. “So that’s what it will be like if I give my baby up? I’ll just be some stranger who incubated her?”

“No, I didn’t mean… adoption and surrogacy are two very different things. You’re not a stranger to her. Whatever you decide to do, you’re her mother. Even if you decide to let her be someone else’s child.” Rachel looked down at her hands, as if she suddenly found her fingernails fascinating.

“Let’s go,” Quinn said after a moment. “I need to get out of here.”

Rachel nodded. “Okay. Let’s go.” She stood up and started to leave the dressing room, but Quinn stopped her.

“Rachel? I need you to help me up.”

*

Quinn bought the clothes she had tried on- not much, really, a few shirts and pairs of pants and a skirt. Her father had taken away her credit cards when he threw her out of her home, and all she had left was her savings account. Before long, she would have to start taking the money that Puck kept offering, a thought which she continually shoved to the very back of her mind.

Once back in her car, driving through the mall parking lot, Quinn spoke to Rachel for the first time since the dressing room. “You’ll have to give me directions to your house.”

“Oh,” Rachel said. “You can just take me back to Brittany’s house with you. I told her I’d help her with her math, today.”

“God, Berry, stalk me much?” Quinn answered, her financial concerns putting an air of irritation in her tone that she didn’t really mean.

Rachel shrugged. “She asked me to. She’s worried about failing, and she said that you hate math, and whenever Santana says they’re going to ‘study Spanish,’ they do something that she doesn’t think counts as studying at all.”

She finished her explanation with a short giggle, and Quinn favored her with a half smile in return. “Yeah. That’s usually what it’s like with the two of them.”

“That must be weird for you,” Rachel said. “Your best friends dating.”

Quinn shrugged, about to ask how would she know, she doesn’t have any friends, but that wasn’t exactly true, anymore. And she was tired of being mean- she lacked the energy and the will. “Yes. It’s a little weird.”

“My fathers are friends with a lot of dramatic lesbian couples, so I know what it’s like,” Rachel explained.

“They’re not lesbians,” Quinn declared immediately.

Rachel shook her head. “I didn’t say that they were. It’s smart not to label yourself at this age, anyway. We’re all going through a lot of changes right now.”

“I didn’t mean…” Quinn paused and started over. “It would be okay if they were.”

Rachel nodded once. “Good.”

Santana’s car was the only one outside of Brittany’s house when they arrived, and Quinn hoped fervently that her friends would not be “studying Spanish” in the living room again.

Thankfully, a fully clothed Brittany threw the front door open as Quinn and Rachel approached. “You’re here!” she said, smiling widely. “Yay. Quinn, I made you cookies, because I know how much the baby likes to eat after school.”

“She _bought_ you cookies,” Santana clarified from inside. “They’re safe to eat.”

Quinn and Rachel followed Brittany’s bouncing ponytail into the house, where they were met with Santana’s disapproving gaze. “What’s RuPaul doing here?”

“She’s going to help me with my math homework!” Brittany said as she skipped off toward the kitchen, re-emerging moments later with a bag of chocolate chip cookies. “So be nice, please. We’ll ‘study Spanish’ after dinner,” she added, making finger quotes in the air, and Rachel had to cover her mouth to keep from laughing.

Brittany held out the bag of cookies for Quinn, which she took gratefully. “Thanks, B. Come on, Santana. Let’s not disturb them while they work,” she said, heading toward the stairs.

Santana rolled her eyes and made a sound not unlike a growl, but followed Quinn anyway. They sat on opposite beds in Brittany’s room, Quinn stuffing her face, Santana flipping through channels on Brittany’s TV.

Santana cast a vaguely disgusted glance at Quinn and the rapidly disappearing cookies. “You’ll never fit back into your uniform if you keep that up.”

Quinn shrugged. “It doesn’t matter. I don’t think Coach Sylvester would take me back, anyway.”

Santana ignored this admission and tossed the remote down onto the bed, frustrated. “You know, I didn’t come over here to sit around and watch TV with you, no offense.”

Quinn raised her eyebrows, and brought another cookie to her lips. “None taken.”

“I’m just not really interested in waiting around while Barbra Streisand hogs all of Brittany’s attention downstairs.”

“We could go somewhere until they’re done studying,” Quinn suggested. “Or we could just go to your house.”

“You’re not allowed at my house,” Santana answered bluntly, eyes on the TV.

Quinn was stunned. “I… what?”

“Look, you know my parents are crazy Catholics,” Santana said, turning to look at Quinn. “They’re not wild about the unwed mother thing, they think you’re a bad influence. Why do you think you’re staying here instead of my house?”

Quinn just looked at her blankly.

“Whatever, it’s not a big deal,” Santana continued. “My parents are assholes. They don’t want me hanging out with you, so I told them you’re still staying at Finn’s house. They don’t fucking control me, and they don’t tell me what to think about my friends. So it’s fine, don’t worry about it.”

A quiet “Okay” was all Quinn could manage to get out.

“Oh, God, you’re not going to cry, are you?”

“No,” Quinn said, shaking her head quickly, but she was blinking back tears all the same.

Santana huffed. “Your hormones are disgusting.”

They watched a Top Model marathon in near silence for an hour, Quinn sniffling periodically and Santana pretending she didn’t notice. Eventually, they could hear Brittany coming down the hall. “I still don’t understand the part about pretend numbers.”

“Imaginary numbers,” Rachel corrected, gently. “That’s okay. We’ll work on that next time.”

The two girls appeared in the doorway, Brittany’s confused expression shifting into concern when she saw Quinn’s watery eyes. She rushed to her friend’s side. “Quinn, what’s wrong! Did Santana say something mean? She probably didn’t mean it, okay?” Brittany wrapped her arms around Quinn and glared at Santana over her shoulder. “I told you to be nice. You know how the baby makes her cry when you’re not nice.”

She pulled away from Quinn and patted her stomach. “It’s okay, baby. Aunt Santana didn’t mean it.”

Santana rolled her eyes. “I didn’t do anything to her, Brittany. She’s having a hormonal breakdown, or something.”

Quinn sniffled again. “It’s okay, Britt. She didn’t say anything mean.”

“Promise?”

“Promise. It’s just a hormonal breakdown, like she said.”

Rachel, who had remained awkwardly in the doorway while Brittany comforted Quinn, cleared her throat. “So, my dad’s going to be here in a few minutes.”

“Later, Treasure Trail,” Santana answered, eyes back on the television. “God, these girls are all ugly.”

In what seemed like one fluid motion, Brittany hopped off the bed and across the room to hug Rachel enthusiastically. “Thanks for helping me! Next time I’ll make you cookies, too.” She lowered her voice. “I would have given you some of Quinn’s, but sometimes she’s scary if you take food away from her.”

Rachel reached up and patted Brittany’s back a couple of times. “It’s no problem, Brittany. You’re sort of choking me a little bit, though.”

Brittany released her grip just as the doorbell rang. “That’s my dad,” Rachel said. “Remember, Brittany, x doesn’t always stand for the same number, okay?”

Brittany nodded. “Okay. If you say so.”

Rachel leaned around Brittany and raised her hand in a tentative wave. “Goodbye, Quinn. I’ll see you tomorrow at school.”

Quinn bit her lip. There were a lot of things she might have liked to say to Rachel in that moment, but rather than run the risk of sounding like the Golden Girls theme song (especially in front of Santana,) she just smiled almost shyly and said, “I’ll see you tomorrow, Rachel.”

Brittany went downstairs with Rachel to see her out, and while they waited for her to return, Santana turned to Quinn once more. “So, just wondering. Is the kinder, gentler Quinn planning on sticking around post-partum? Because I don’t know if I’m okay with that.”

Quinn opened her mouth to answer, but before she could decide what to say, Brittany reappeared in the doorway, head tilted and once again looking confused. “What’s wrong?” Quinn asked. “Is it the math, again?”

Brittany shook her head. “No, it’s not that… just… if Rachel’s dad is black… why is she white?”

*


End file.
